One of the first exhibits visitors see at the newly renovated National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis displays statues of shackled and branded black men, sitting in a line with knees near their chins, on the deck of a creaking slave ship headed across an ocean.

An 18th-century painting looted by the Nazis for Adolf Hitler's 'Fuehrer Museum' was handed back to Poland on Monday, a move Germany hopes will revive thorny talks over a vast trove of historical documents that Berlin wants to recover from Poland.